1. Technical Field
The invention relates to a reception and dismantling cell for a nuclear fuel assembly of the type comprising a bundle of fuel rods retained at the nodes of a regular lattice by a skeleton formed of two end pieces connected together by tie rods and grids spaced apart along the tie rods.
When such fuel assemblies are removed from a reactor after irradiation, they must be stored in a swimming pool until the deactivation is sufficient to make it possible to remove the rods. It is desirable to reduce as much as possible the volume occupied by the elements of the assembly during deactivation so as to increase the storage capacity of the swimming pool.
2. Prior Art
An installation is already known (Beneck et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,731,219) for separating a fuel assembly into a skeleton and rods, which form the most active elements, and consolidating the rods in the form of a bunch of jointing rods distributed according to a triangular lattice. The installation comprises a cell receiving the fuel assembly to be dismantled for successively removing an end piece then extracting the rods. The cell comprises a vertical structure with a cross-section corresponding to that of the assembly to be received, having mechanisms for retaining the grids and the lower end piece and a mechanism for holding the rods at their nominal spacing with combs movable between a position in which they are outside the assembly and a position in which the fingers of the combs are engaged between the rods, above the highest remaining grid after removal of the upper end piece.